Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.

Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. “Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafelson,” he said. “But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you.”

Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.

He still has a father.

She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.

“Long day?”

She shook her head, wondering how to begin.

“Is Wishtoes pregnant?”

“No,” Kaye said. She took the plunge. “Are you feeling very scientific?”

Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. “Depends.” His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.

“Scientific and discreet?”

Roth’s eyes widened with something like panic.

“Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson—”

“Kaye, please.”

“Kaye. I think you’re very attractive, but… If it’s about the Machine, I’ve already got a list of Web sites that show… I mean, it’s already been done.” He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. “Hell, I’ve done it. Not alone, I mean.”

“Done what?” Kaye asked.

Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow scrape of the plastic legs. “I have no idea what in hell you’re talking about.”

Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this, she thought. It’s a charmed moment.

“Why are you down here?” Roth asked.

“I’m offering you a unique opportunity.” Kaye felt impossibly nervous, but she was not going to let that stop her. As far as she knew, there had never been an opportunity like this in the history of science—nothing confirmed, at least, or even rumored. “I’m having an epiphany.”

Roth raised one eyebrow, bewildered.

“You don’t know what an epiphany is?” Kaye asked.

“I’m Catholic. It’s a feast celebrating Jesus’ divinity. Or something like that.”

“It’s a manifestation,” Kaye said. “God is inside me.”

“Whoa,” Roth said. The word hung between them for several seconds, during which time Kaye did not look away from Roth’s eyes. He blinked first. “I suppose that’s great,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”

“God comes to most of us. I’ve read William James and other books about this kind of experience. At least half of the human race goes through it at one time or another. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt. It’s life changing, even if it is very… very inconvenient. And inexplicable. I didn’t ask for it, but I can’t, I won’t deny that it is real.”

Roth listened to Kaye with a fixed expression, brow wrinkled, eyes wide, mouth open. He sat up in the chair and folded his arms on the desk. “No joke?”

“No joke.”

He considered further. “Everyone is under pressure here.”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” Kaye said. Then, slowly, she added, “I’ve considered that possibility, I really have. I just don’t think that’s what it is.”

Roth licked his lips and avoided her stare. “So what does it have to do with me?”

She reached out to touch his arm, and he quickly withdrew it. “Herbert, has anyone ever imaged a person who’s being touched by God? Who’s having an epiphany?”

“Lots of times,” Roth said defensively. “Persinger’s research. Meditation states, that sort of thing. It’s in the literature.”

“I’ve read them all. Persinger, Damasio, Posner, and Ramachandran.” She ticked the list off on her fingers. “You think I haven’t researched this?”

Roth smiled in embarrassment.

“Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control… But not this. I’ve looked it up. It can’t be induced, no matter how hard you pray. It comes and it goes as if it has a will of its own.”

“God doesn’t just talk to us,” Roth said. “I mean, even if I believed in God, such a thing would be incredibly rare, and maybe it hasn’t happened for a couple of thousand years. The prophets. Jesus. That sort of thing.”

“It isn’t rare. It’s called many things, and people react differently. It does something to you. It turns your life around, gives it direction and meaning. Sometimes it breaks people.” She shook her head. “Mother Teresa wept because she didn’t have God making regular visits. She wanted continuing confirmation of the value of her work, her pain, her sacrifices. Yet no one actually knows if Mother Teresa experienced what I’m experiencing…” She took a deep breath. “I want to learn what is happening to me. To us. We need a baseline to understand.”

Roth tried to fit this into some catalog of social quid pro quos, and could not. “Kaye, is this really the place? Aren’t you supposed to be doing research on viruses? Or do you think God is a virus?”

Kaye stared at Roth in disbelief. “No,” she said. “This is not a virus. This is not something genetic and it’s probably not even biological. Except to the extent that it touches me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Kaye closed her eyes again. She did not need to search. The sensation rolled on, coming in waves of amazement, of childlike glee and adult consternation, all of her emotions and reactions met not with tolerance, nor even with amusement, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance.

Something was sipping from Kaye Lang’s soul, and found her delicious.

“Because it’s bigger than anything I know,” she said finally. “I have no idea how long it’s going to last, but whatever it is, it’s happened before to people, many times, and it’s shaped human history. Don’t you want to see what it looks like?”

Roth sighed as he examined the images on the large monitor.

Two and a half hours had passed; it was almost ten o’clock. Kaye had been through seven varieties of NMR, PET, and computerized tomography scans. She had been injected, shielded, injected again, rotated like a chicken on a spit, turned upside down. For a while, she wondered if Roth was bent on taking revenge for her imposition.

Finally, Roth had wrapped her head in a white plastic helmet and put her through a final and, he claimed, rather expensive CT-motion scan, capable, he muttered vaguely, of extraordinary detail, focusing on the hippocampus, and then, in another sweep, the brain stem.

Now she sat upright, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, her head and neck bruised from clamps, feeling a vague urge to throw up. Somewhere near the end of the procedures, the caller had simply faded, like a shortwave radio signal from across the seas. Kaye felt calm and relaxed, despite her soreness.

She also felt sad, as if a good friend had just departed, and she was not sure they would ever meet again.

“Well, whatever he is,” Roth said, “he isn’t talking. None of the scans show extensive speech processing, above the level of normal internal dialog and my own datum of questions. You seem, no surprise, a little nervous—but less so than other patients. Stoic might be the word. You show a fair amount of deep brain activity, signifying a pretty strong emotional response. Do you embarrass easily?”